News Posts

It’s one of the most recognizable dinosaur species, yet most people know it by a name most paleontologists stopped using more than a century ago: Brontosaurus.

One of the most iconic specimens of this massive animal is on display in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, the first sauropod—a species belonging to the group of massive, herbivorous, long-tailed dinosaurs—to be mounted and displayed at the Museum.

For more than four decades, Dame Daphne Sheldrick has devoted her life to rescuing orphaned animals in East Africa and preparing them for return to the wild on her elephant orphanage near Nairobi, Kenya. In this podcast from the spring, Dame Daphne looks back at her life as a conservationist, and elaborates on stories from her recent memoir, “Love, Life and Elephants: An African Love Story.”

The actress Kristin Davis introduced Dame Daphne’s talk, which was recorded at the museum on May 8, 2012.

Hominid fossils recently unearthed in Kenya provide evidence that the evolutionary line from Homo habilis—the earliest known species of the genus Homo—to Homo sapiens is not as direct as once believed, according to a feature story published August 8 in The New York Times. The fossils may confirm the simultaneous existence of at least three Homo species in East Africa some 2 million years ago.

The New York Times story about the discovery quotes Ian Tattersall, who studies the human fossil record as curator emeritus in the Museum’s Division of Anthropology. While Tattersall was not involved in the fossils’ discovery, his work similarly seeks to help unravel the mysteries of human evolution.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1, the first man-made satellite to successfully orbit the Earth, its beeping signal picked up by radio operators around the globe. Weighing in at just under 184 pounds and measuring 22.8 inches in diameter, Sputnik soared to space amid the tensions of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, creating significant political and scientific fallout. A life-sized model of the satellite, whose name means “fellow traveler” in Russian, is featured in the current exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration.